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Join the Hunt For the Government's Oldest Computer (muckrock.com)
v3rgEz writes: As the saying goes, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' If a machine is doing its job, reliably and without error, then common sense dictates that you just shouldn't mess with it. This is doubly true for computers and quadruply true for government computers. This lends itself to an obvious question: what's the government computer most in need of an upgrade? MuckRock has launched a new FOIA project to find out, and has already started receiving some interesting results.
According to the FAA, just knowing what kinds of computers the FAA is using would endanger the security of national air traffic. That's pretty bad, both for this project and my confidence in our air traffic system.After all, despite my vague wording, the FAA found 11 pages of documents responsive to the same request. But! They refused to release any of their records to me, citing the blanket Exemption 3 because they deemed, "disclosure would be detrimental to the safety of persons traveling in air transportation."
He does say in the article that some agencies have confirmed mainframes from circa 1970, but doesn't say which specifically. It should be interesting to see how this project goes over the next few months.
I'd be curious if he has a way to differentiate active, in-use machines vs. old stuff that may just still be in the inventory roles. I helped a bit with my previous company's effort to clear out old storage and inventory and there was some pretty old equipment that had been in the closet for close to a decade, plus some stuff in their inventory records that had long since disappeared.
So I wonder if that Gateway Liberty 2000 is actually still sitting on someone's desk where the toil away with WordPerfect and Windows 3.1 every day, or if it got tossed/walked out of the building in the late 90s and no one bothered to update the records.
A couple of years ago I heard of a late-70's VAX still being used at a small power plant. To my knowledge it controlled some sort of HVAC systems. Another old system, one I've actually seen, was a mid-80's computer of unknown make/model used to control traffic lights in a small city. It's funny, or actually impressive, to see such old systems still in use. The old-school guys that keep them running tell nice stories about flea market and eBay scavenging.
-SR
When a department gets downsized for one reason or another at my government job, the department manger is supposed to turn in all the unused workstations for redeployment or recycling. They typically don't. A favorite hiding space is the utility closet inside a women restroom. All the field techs are male. Go figure.
"If a machine is doing its job, reliably and without error, then common sense dictates that you just shouldn't mess with it."
"what's the government computer most in need of an upgrade?"
You've just given a great reason why some hardware is still in use, it works.
Why turn around and conclude that it needs an upgrade?
"knowing which agencies are running hardware older than I am is important"
Sure, for a very loose definition of important.
What's with. the random periods. in your sentences?
A double space on the iPhone virtual keyboard becomes a period. Type too fast, random periods appear.
I hate that goddamn phrase. When the inevitable time comes when suddenly the old system *does* break, it's no longer under any support, nobody's left at the company who knows how it works, there's no budget for a modern replacement, and it has to be fixed in four hours or the company goes bankrupt. Been there, done that, ate the T-shirt after hours of working with no break for food.
People who say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" are the same idiots who brag about uptime.
Pro tip: *every* system is broken. The trick is being able to repair or work around the broken parts without disruption, not to just seal it behind a wall and rediscover it years later when trying to track down what's still pinging.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Back in the 1980s my then-employer shared the cost with the FAA of updating IBM's 1401 emulator to the latest architecture (IIRC whatever was the half generation between 370 and 390), so I wouldn't count on that 360 being the oldest!
sPh
I've found that sometimes old systems leave footprints that last far beyond the computers themselves.
For example, a couple of years ago we had this working networked system that we wanted to upgrade one computer of. The issue was that the protocol used to talk between the systems was a custom network layer written on top of a serial protocol called DR-11W. The cards were rather hard to find, the hardware very finicky to get talking right, and finding good docs for our custom layer was a real challenge.
I eventually found out in researching it that DR-11W was in fact the serial printer port on the original PDP-11's back in the 70's. Neither machine was a PDP-11, but since every upgrade ever done was one computer at a time, we've had to maintain this PDP-11 printer port communications interface for the last 40 years. The protocol even required converting all floating-point values to IBM's old format even though neither side used that format! The conversion's not trivial either.
Our one vendor for these cards has since gone out of business. The story I heard is that they lost their building lease, and didn't feel like it was worth it to move. So it looks like next upgrade, the PDP-11 printer port networking may finally die.
The moral here is that just because the 40-year-old computer may be physically gone, it might not really be gone.
I used to run a pair hobbyist/enthusiast sites for fans of DEC's VAX and PDP-11 series of machines.
Shortly after 9/11, I got a phone call from someone at the Pentagon who was looking for certain parts so they could repair an older VAX that had been damaged in the attack. I was able to get them in touch with a third-party reseller who still had those bits in the back of a dusty warehouse.
It was surprising that they hadn't upgraded to Alpha (which had been out almost ten years) then; the telco where I worked had one big system that had gone through three company changes (DEC -> Compaq -> HP) and had been upgraded in-chassis from VAX to Alpha.
I think all large systems sold to the federal government are required to have service/support available for something like 5 to 10 years after final sale availability; can't find concrete details via Google.
There are lots of systems that were designed around embedded PDP-8s and PDP-11s. And given the numbers of Digital VAX sold and specialized software it would not be very surprising if some of these systems are still be used. There were probably over 1.5 million of these machines sold (about 300,000 PDP-8s, 700,000 PDP-11s, 500,000 VAX machines), so there's probably some happily humming away.
I'm sure the same is true for some earlier IBM 360/370, but they had a better upgrade path and were more expensive to start with. Most of those machines got replaced when they came off lease or the parts availability expired. But probably some of the software from the early 360's is still be used.
Those were the days when machines were rock solid (and weighed about as much). Unlike today, when electronics are designed to be replaced every two years or so.
random periods appear
"Scheduled monthlies" are bad enough; I can only imagine how rough "random" must be for those around you...
While we had fun telling visitors to the labs that most of systems running Air Traffic Control were "essentially from the 60s and 70s" that's only technically correct.
The truth is the original HOST mainframes were replaced in the 80s, and then again in the 90s, and now being phased out for ERAM (which is built out of COTS PC parts). In some cases software was brought forward during upgrades, so it may have been possible you'd of been running some assembly code back from the Apollo era but not really. There were still some oddities, though (like the "units" of some fields being in 64ths of a nautical mile), that made interfacing with the ARTCC systems fun.
There might be some ARTS IIA terminals left? Those are vintage early '80s, but I think they've all been replaced with at least IIE or IIIE ('90s) and are all slated to become some form of STARS (late '90s) by 2020 or so.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Amen to that. The FOIA has a purpose--to maintain open government. It was not designed to allow the merely curious to indulge their historical fantasies. Replying to this kind of stuff costs money, and guess who pays?
I've seen cases where, for example, an activist decides the local public library's stance on open access to the Internet violates their stance on "decency" because it allows some people to view pornography, so said activist embarked on a campaign to ask the library for EVERY document they had on budget, personnel, policies, emails, etc. It was so bad that the library--not exactly an over-funded and wasteful public agency, had to hire a full time secretary just to respond to the myriad of requests.
Basically it all translated to less materials purchased and fewer service hours open to the public while taking an inordinate amount of the library management's time and resources.
This is just harassment and a misuse of the statute enacted in good faith.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Reminds me of my first marriage. One night, after twenty years, I discovered that it was indeed broke. A light tap, and the whole thing shattered. The most solid things are often the most fragile. It is wiser to periodically evaluate your universe.